What went wrong in handling of South Philadelphia violence

Published in The Notebook

Former South Philadelphia High School student Hao Luu is now attending a private school his family can scarcely afford, is repeating 9th grade, and is not receiving any formal Englishas- a-second-language instruction.

Beaten after school on December 2, the day before an explosion of violence against Asian immigrant students, Luu, a 17-year-old student from Vietnam, ended up spending months fighting disciplinary charges and then countering accusations that he is a gang member.

The School District said it has now mailed him a letter for his file that clears him of any gang involvements. But he, his grandmother, and the School Reform Commission (SRC) are still awaiting a formal explanation of why he was suspended in the first place, transferred to a disciplinary school, and then prevented from returning to South Philadelphia, even after the charges against him were dismissed.

The series of mass assaults at South Philadelphia on December 3 injured 30 students and sent 13 to area hospitals, prompting an eight-day boycott of the school by dozens of Asian students.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a federal civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice, charging the District and school with “deliberate indifference” to a history of harassment of Asian students.

Responses to the violence

Since the violence, the District has implemented new security measures at the school, hired a diversity consultant for staff training, and organized crosscultural activities and groups.

But 18 speakers at a March 17 SRC meeting, including Hao Luu’s grandmother and nine Asian students, criticized the District for its handling of the aftermath. The testimony pointed to a failure to communicate with families, an inadequate investigation of the violence, and a lack of action against school staff who responded inappropriately.

Speakers also said that the District had failed to acknowledge a pattern of violence against Asian students, reacting instead by accusing Hao Luu and others of being gang members and implying that they were somehow responsible.

The tearful testimony of his grandmother, Suong Nguyen, and Hao Luu’s story made front-page news, becoming the latest illustration of the District’s puzzling and as yet unexplained handling of the incident.

“Review Hao’s case and clear him from wrongful accusations,” said Nguyen.
A distressed Commissioner Johnny Irizarry pushed the issue with SRC Chair Robert Archie.

“Mr. Archie, I would just like to request that the staff provide us an explanation for this,” Irizarry said.

“Rest assured, they will,” Archie replied.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the District was preparing a response on the handling of the case and would not comment until the SRC sees it.

Counting Luu’s case, five of the 19 suspensions meted out after the December attacks on Asian students were overturned, Gallard said.

The District did not offer the Notebook a breakdown of how many of the suspended South Philadelphia students were African American or Asian, though previously they had told the press that eight Asians were among those suspended. Nor did the District release the ethnicity of the students whose
suspensions were overturned.

Luu and his grandmother said they went public to try to clear his record and reputation.

“The school is accusing me of something that I’m not guilty of,” Luu told the Notebook through an interpreter in February. “They are messing up my record.

They have gone too far, and that’s why I continue making this an issue.”

While not mentioned by name, Luu was a central figure in the official School District report on the South Philadelphia violence – an investigation conducted by a retired federal judge, James Giles, at the request of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman.

The Giles report describes an incident involving a Vietnamese student and a group of African American students in a stairwell at South Philadelphia High School on December 2. The report said this confrontation led to a conflict after school that day – what the judge called the “Walgreen’s incident.”

The judge’s report offered four conflicting versions of what happened outside that Walgreen’s store on December 2 while not resolving contradictory reports about who attacked whom and whether a “crippled/disabled African American student” cited in these accounts was a victim or an attacker.

The report recommended that the school and the District interview witnesses about what really happened.

Giles pointed to rumors about the Walgreen’s incident as triggering the attacks on Asian students December 3.

Ackerman, in her first public statement about the violence, referenced one hearsay version of the incident, saying the conflict at the school “began as an unwarranted off-campus attack on a disabled African American student.”

Hao Luu’s story

Hao Luu said after an incident in the stairwell in the afternoon, he and four friends were followed after school that day and attacked twice by a group of 10 or more students.

“I got beat down and fell in the Walgreen’s driveway,” he said.

His grandmother went to school the next day to file a report. Luu stayed home on December 3 due to his injuries, and then participated in the eightday Asian student boycott.

Luu first heard he had been suspended when he returned to school after the boycott. He then received a transfer to a disciplinary school and missed weeks of school while challenging the charges.

Advocates said Luu’s paperwork showed numerous due process errors, including untranslated notices and repeated failure to contact the family in a timely manner.

With the help of Cecilia Chen, an attorney from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Luu prevailed in a disciplinary hearing on January 29.

The hearing officer overturned the transfer and reenrolled Luu at South Philadelphia.

But when he tried to return, he was again denied entry and presented with yet another transfer signed by Principal LaGreta Brown and approved by a regional superintendent.

In a follow-up conversation in early February, Chen was told by a District lawyer that the school couldn’t guarantee Luu’s safety because he was involved with a gang.

Soon after, having missed so much school, Luu enrolled in the private school.
In a subsequent meeting with school officials, Luu was accused of being involved in a fight at the school a year before, Chen said. But he had been living in Virginia at the time. He had only been attending South Philly High for three months when he was attacked, and he had no disciplinary record at either school.

Luu said he regrets not being able to stay at South Philadelphia “because they have a good ESL program.”

“The family has gone through so much,” attorney Chen noted. “And they’re still distressed after how the school dealt with their responsibility.”

At Potter-Thomas, change the only constant

Published in The Notebook

For the past eight years at Potter-Thomas Elementary School, the only constant has been change.

As a low-performing school, it was turned over toEdison Schools in 2002. But because it made little improvement, it was taken away from Edison in 2008.

During and after Edison’s tenure, Potter-Thomas has had a total of six principals. This year, parents finally got one they liked and who seemed to be making a difference. Since Dywonne Davis-Harris came in September, there has been a palpable change in school climate and a renewed focus on academics.

“With this new principal, we have seen an improvement overall, even in the behavior of the students,” said Guadalupe Tovar, who has three children at the school.

But now, as a designated Renaissance School, Potter-Thomas is facing yet another upheaval, just as parents thought they had found some stability. The school is in line to be matched with one of five possible outside providers – all of which would convert the school into a charter.

Parents – the school is 95 percent low-income and 78 percent Latino – are worried about what becoming a charter will mean.

“Now there’s resources for parents and kids,” said Elizabeth Álvarez, whose granddaughter is a student. “There was nothing before and now they want to take it away from us.”

Álvarez and several other parents want to keep the principal, and as a result spoke before the School Reform Commission asking to become a Promise Academy – or undergo turnaround under the supervision of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman. That way, the school can stay within the District and have a better chance of retaining Davis-Harris at the helm.

“We the parents are very fond of the way our administration leadership team and us have brought the school and made all the changes to put Potter-Thomas to where it is today,” said Midgalia López in testimony before the SRC, as a group of Potter-Thomas parents stood by. The day before, they had held a protest at the school  against becoming a charter.

López is a noontime aide at the school and grandparent of a 3rd grader. “We need a chance,” she said. “And that chance is a Promise Academy.”

Ackerman was responsive to their concerns. She said she would make an exception for Potter-Thomas among the nine schools now undergoing the matching process, giving the school the option of rejecting all potential partners and becoming a Promise Academy instead.

The community will have its meeting with the potential providers on May 6, and the School Advisory Council, which is made up of parents and several representatives of local organizations, has until May 11 to decide.

If, after that meeting, “the community is still not satisfied,” said Benjamin Rayer, who is running the Renaissance process for the District, “becoming a Promise Academy might be an option.”

All this uncertainty, however, is just creating more anxiety among parents and grandparents who are used to being buffeted about by institutions and government in one of the poorest areas of the city.

Rumors are flying

“Some say there’ll be free uniforms, others just talk about how good everything is going to be, but we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Tovar said.

At the school, which is 78 percent Latino and 20 percent African-American, 25 percent of the students are English language learners, 15 percent are in special education, and the churn of students is constant. In 2007-08, nearly 100 students in the 475-student school withdrew during the year, and another 70 enrolled. The following year, those numbers declined, but were still high.

Despite those factors, of the 14 Renaissance-eligible schools reviewed by a team of evaluators earlier this year, Potter-Thomas received one of the most positive reports. Some of the schools were cited for total breakdown of leadership, lack of instruction, and out-of-control climate.

But at Potter-Thomas, the reviewers said, “leadership has worked to create a unified voice that is focused on high expectations for student achievement,” “there are clear goals and improvement strategies,” and “school administrators serve as an instructional leadership team.” Teachers have common planning time and more opportunities for professional development.

At the same time, it noted, good instructional practices “have yet to be established school-wide.” Scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests (PSSA) remain woefully low, especially in the upper grades.

Davis-Harris agreed that the most improvement to date has been made in school climate and student behavior, which she attributed to help from parents, teachers and the District. “I knew it was going to be a good challenge when I first came here,” she said.

Whatever happens, she said, her work to improve the students academic achievement is an ongoing task.

“We’re using multiple approaches to do it,” she said. “We have instruction specialists providing our teachers with teaching techniques every week. We create an environment where we can give each other feedback. We all have in mind that this is to benefit our children.”

As part of the process in deciding the school’s future, SAC members and anyone else who is interested will have the chance to visit other schools operated by the potential tunaround teams, which include two Latino-focused organizations,ASPIRA and Congreso de Latinos Unidos. Both run charter schools. They are the only providers who have expressed particular interest in working with Potter-Thomas.

Nicholas Torres, president of Congreso, said that the parents don’t have animosity towards these groups, but have a fear of the unknown. “It seems parents are reacting to a lot of rumors, and it seems there’s no official providing actual information,” he said. “That’s why it is important for parents to show up to the meetings that will be held there.”

For Tovar, however, the issue is simple. “What we want is to have stability for our children” she said, “because they keep changing things around here even if they work.”

Immigrant students find school system didn’t have them in mind

Published in The Notebook

National data show high dropout rates, but locally there are no studies.

José Ángel Torres (left) and his brother David. When Torres started attending an American school, he encountered language and culture barriers that made him hate school from day one. Harvey Finkle/The Notebook

When José Ángel Torres arrived in the United States seven years ago, the most difficult thing was trying to understand what was going on around him.

He was only 10 and did not speak English. Nonetheless he was expected to be like any other 5th grader, learning math, science, and other subjects. He said no one bothered asking him if he needed any help.

Torres is one of an untold number of immigrant youth who have dropped out of Philadelphia high schools.

One recent national study found that immigrants make up nearly one quarter of the country’s teen dropouts.

“I didn’t like school from the beginning because I didn’t understand anything,” Torres recalled. “I felt I was dumb, especially with the vocabulary exams; those really screwed me up.”

Lost and lonely in a new world, his mind was set only on going back to his native Mexico – until hip hop came into his life, teaching him lessons he did not find in the classroom.

“I started listening to the radio, lots of music like Eminem, 50 Cent, Tupac and Biggie; I liked what they did with language,” he said.

Growing up in Philadelphia was not easy. He faced violence in and out of school and classrooms that felt more like a prison than like a learning hub.

“I would start cutting class one day here and there with my friends, but nothing serious until last year,” he said. It took a while to realize that “I wasn’t going to school at all.”

Torres remembers having at least 70 absences before he stopped attending Furness High in South Philadelphia last year. He said no one approached him to push him to return to school until his mother pleaded with him to go back and finish.

“I don’t really want to go to school, but I’m doing it because of my mom and now because of the baby my girlfriend and I are expecting,” he said.

Torres is now enrolled at Performance Learning Center SW, an accelerated school for over-age and under-credited students run by Communities in Schools.

His story is typical of what many immigrant children face when they come to this country. The education system was shaped without them in mind, and reform policies “fail to consider their particular needs or realities,” according to researchers Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco of New York University.

As a result, these children often wind up in inappropriate settings, receiving inappropriate instruction.

Nationally, the consequences for immigrant youth are apparent. In a 2005 study, the Pew Hispanic Center found that while only 8 percent of the nation’s teens are foreign-born, nearly 25 percent of teen dropouts were born outside the United States.

“The dropout rate for teens with school problems before migration is in excess of 70 percent, in comparison with 8 percent for other foreign-born youths,” stated the report.

The Pew study said many of these were poorly educated before arriving.

The study also found that many immigrant youth never enrolled in school in the United States; the purpose in migrating for many youth was probably to seek employment.

This and other research suggests that by not keeping track of immigrant children’s academic achievement and their families’ needs, many problems go undetected. Schools lack services not only for these youth but for their families as well, which increases the chance they’ll drop out.

In Philadelphia, the only available graduation data related to immigrants are the School District’s records for English language learners (ELLs) – whose graduation rate is 57 percent, close to the District average. That ELL rate, however, is a composite of rates for an array of nationalities that sheds no light on the performance of particular ethnic groups.

Moreover, ELLs and immigrant populations do not coincide – students from Puerto Rico are citizens whose first language is Spanish while some immigrants are native English speakers.

“The District doesn’t have a direct indicator of immigrant kids because it is illegal to ask kids who are registering whether they have a Social Security number,” explained Mary Yee, who ran the District’s now-extinct Office of Family Engagement and Language Equity Services.

Even when determining where a student was born, “that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. You don’t know who are the children living with immigrant families,” Yee said.

Some say they spot the immigrant students when the time comes to fill out college applications.

“Almost 50 percent of my students, most of them the brightest in their class, don’t fill them out because they won’t be able to attend college due to their status; the door is almost shut for them,” said Nilza Lozada, Edison/Fareira High School’s multicultural SLC coordinator.

The School District did not respond to requests for information about current initiatives to help immigrant students.

Like Torres, many immigrant youth in Philadelphia face violence and discrimination.

“We encountered a lack of resources at schools; the language barrier was also an issue because all letters to my parents were never translated and this is still the case today in many schools,” said Xu Lin, a Chinese youth organizer and a Furness High graduate.

He also pointed to family economic needs.

“Most immigrant students come from working class families,” he said. “Their family prefers them to work than to attend school; they are pressured to work to support the family.”

This is the case for Javi, whose full name the Notebook is withholding due to his immigration status. He left his family in Mexico when he was 15 to provide for his mother after finishing the Mexican equivalent of middle school.

“Down there, you only think of coming here to work – not to go to school,” he said.

“I would like to get an education, but I would have to fully learn the language first and that takes time. Right now I need to make money to send it back home.”

Addressing The Drop Out Rate Among Philly’s Most Vulnerable Students

The drop out rate among Philadelphia’s most vulnerable teens may not account to a big chunk out of the larger crisis. But when taking closer look, one sees that pregnant teens, kids just released from the juvenile system, children living in foster care and others going through homelessness drop out of school at outrageous rates when compared to their peers. “In fact, between 70 to 90 percent of these groups of youth left school without graduating,” reads an article in The Philadelphia Public School Notebook. In their latest issue, The Notebook presents a package of stories on what the School District of Philadelphia has done to address the problem among these groups. The following links will take you to the different stories.

Pregnant and parenting teens

Adjudicated youth

Youth in foster care

Homeless youth